Over the past few months P4P has seen multiple examples of companies using Personalized URLs or PURLs as a part of direct mail marketing campaigns. What is a PURL? Quite simply a PURL is a page on your website personalized for every person to whom you send a postcard. Here’s how it works: You will create a page on your website that everyone who receives the postcard will go to. When you purchase a mailing list that file is used to personalize that site for everyone on the list. Think of it like an advanced version of Mail Merge. When the postcards go out, each one would be personalized.
Here’s an example:
You can see there are two types of personalization. The first name of the person is used at the top of the card and a PURL is created at the bottom of the card. When Wendy gets her card the idea is that the personalization will catch her eye and lead her to check out the website. When Wendy types in the web address she will see the web page the church has created again with personalization just for her.
Some companies are even offering to adjust the images on the card based on who the card is going to. If the card is going to a family with young children, the images would reflect familes with young children. If the card were going to an elderly person it would have images of elderly people.
As with any new technology, it cost more money to use a PURLs than it does to use traditional postcards. However, the claim is that the response rate is 2-4 times greater using PURLs. If you are considering a direct mail campaign it may be worth your time/money to consider using PURLs.
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Tags: 4 Comments
4 responses so far ↓
Wow, do those sites get indexed by the search engines or do you edit your robots.txt when using PURLs?
I could see people getting massively ticked off at their name being attached to a website they didn’t endorse. Even more upset if my church site came up on a Google search for their name!
Sounds like a pretty spammy thing to do when sending to “blind” or “cold” addresses.
Sounds like a rawkin’ awesome thing to do for volunteer leaders at your church or members your team to make them feel cool.
Soooo… This sounds awesome. Any companies you could point me to? Thanks!!
I like this. I think it could help make a church’s direct mail stand out from the crowd. And in areas where direct mail isn’t used heavily, it could help create a real wow factor.
The only company I’ve worked with on PURLs at this point is Church Marketing Solutions. http://www.church-marketing.com I’m sure several others are doing it as well. Web Accelerated Marketing http://www.wampower.com has a built in feature to their online software that allows you to do this yourself.